My Bensen was the first object I built out of metal. Before that, I banged together shacks and treehouses out of scrap lumber and raw logs. I skipped the motorcycle thing and only gradually learned about car mechanicking.
The post-WWII culture of "Dad smoking his pipe while tinkering in his hobby hut" has definitely gone the way of tailfins on cars. Heathkit is gone, Radio Shack is gone.
You could write an interesting pop-sociology book about why - - the evaporation of good-paying blue-collar jobs, the passing of the hard-scrabble Great Depression ethic, the scarcity of people who grew up on farms, digital distractions, instant delivery from Amazon, 9/11 and the rise of unfocused fear, blah, blah. Great stuff for a late-night dorm room bull session.
The FAA's amateur-built regs, a relic of that bygone era, have become a loophole through which uncertified, but factory-finished, aircraft can be sold as "kits." They're really complete aircraft, knocked down for shipping and reassembled by the user. As long ago as the original Air Command, you could put one together in paint-by-number fashion over a weekend, popping precut and pre-painted parts off a series of large blister cards and bolting them on.
A person who completes one of these "kits" has a better understanding of his aircraft than someone who just writes a check and turns the key. In fact, you can argue that drilling the holes in the tubing yourself doesn't add much to the education you get with an assembly-only "kit." Still, it's not quite as immersive as Paul Poberezny sawing and welding salvaged 4130 into an original-design tube-and-rag biplane. That was the sort of project that the amateur-built regs were aimed at.
There will always be some scratch-builders (some for the personal rewards and others to save a buck), but it's far more of a quaint curiosity than it once was.
